Out of the goodness of my infinite heart and the uncontested benevolence that is associated with my name, I hereby deign and consent to respond to two of your queries.
Don't push your luck.
Okay, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a professor of psychology, unfortunately, for all my students.
First question that I received in the comments section.
I have a question about narcissists talking after a romantic relationship ending. Narcissist calling, texting, sending messages through third party with the aim of reuniting. Could it be viewed as a prolonged owering?
I would be most grateful for an extensive answer from a person with credentials such as yours. Thank you. A little flattery will go a long way with me.
Okay, shoshan in this particular case there is an an abyss a gulf a huge difference between stalking and hoovering one could even say that hoovering is the opposite of stalking.
Yes, I know it sounds strange, because outwardly they look the same. In both cases, stalking and hovering, there's a person who is on your case, keeps calling, keeps messaging, keeps interfering in your life, keeps communicating with you via third parties, including flying monkeys, and so and so forth. In both cases, this attention is usually unwanted, not always, but usually unwanted.
In hoovering, some people like it, but stalking is definitely unwanted.
So what are the differences?
Stalking is about control and sometimes about vengeance. It's a form of exerting or reasserting control over the one who got away. And then manipulating via fear and intimidation in order to create circumstances favorable to the attainment of some goal. The goal could be sex, the goal could be vengeance, but it's goal oriented.
Stalking in this sense is psychopathic. Hoovering is narcissistic and like everything else about narcissism it has to do with narcissistic supply.
Hoovering is a form of co-idealization.
Let me remind you what is co-idealization.
Co-idealization is when the narcissist love bombs you, tells you that you're perfect, you could do no wrong, you're drop-dead gorgeous, you are hyper-intelligent, you're the best thing that has ever happened to him, you're a gift to humanity and definitely to him, etc., etc.
So in this process of idealizing you, the narcissist is actually idealizing himself as well, because he owns you. He is the owner of an ideal object which renders him ideal as well. It's like owning a flashy car or the latest smartphone, you know, it's a kind of status symbol. It says something about you.
So idealization is always co-idealization. The narcissist idealizes you mostly in order to idealize himself.
If you are super intelligent, what does it say about the narcissist? That is your equal, probably your superior, more intelligent than you, and therefore a genius. If you are drop dead gorgeous, it means the narcissist is irresistibly attractive, and so on and so forth.
Co-idealization.
Hoovering is an attempt to re-idealize, to introduce again idealization into the relationship, in order to re-idealize the narcissist.
So, hovering is about self-supply.
The narcissist idealizes you or re-idealizes you, having discarded you, having devalued you, having mistreated you, having abused you, having fought you in court, having stalked you perhaps, having tortured you and tormented you and punished you and everything, it's as if nothing has happened because narcissists don't have memory.
You may recall, yes? There is severe problem with dissociation and memory gaps. They always start from zero. Every day is new. No credit is accumulated. No memories are there.
So the narcissist approaches you as if there is a blank slate. No history. No egregious acts. No attempts to compromise you and ruin your life, nothing, none of this has happened. He approaches you as innocently as the driven snow and he asks you to be in a religion, to be in the shared fantasy. And he starts immediately, embarks immediately on re-idealizing, thereby re-idealizing himself in relationship, in relation to you.
So as you see, this has nothing to do with stalking. It's not about control. It's not about any goal like sex or vengeance or money or whatever. It's not psychopathy. And it's not about you.
Hoovering is not about you. Stalking is about you. Hoovering is not about you. It's about the narcissist.
Okay, well I think I've exhausted the subject and the subject exhausted me which forces me to move on to the next question.
Why do female covert narcissists allow an awful amount of abuse from cerebral narcissists and other similar types, but when she's dating a normal non-narcissist, she is furious over innocent mistakes or minor mistakes.
In other words, a double standard. When the covert narcissist is with a cerebral narcissist or, you know, she allows the cerebral narcissists to abuse her egregiously, extremely, and so on. But when she's with a normal guy, you know, healthy, relatively healthy, definitely not a narcissist, she does the same to that person. She abuses that person the way the cerebral narcissist abuses her.
Why this double standard?
Well, the answer is that the aforementioned female covert narcissist is submissive with people she perceives as dominant. And she is dominant with people she perceives as submissive. She abuses downwards, never upwards. She exerts dominance and control downwards, never upwards. Upwards she's a lackey, upwards she's an ass-kisser, she is obsequious, upwards, people who she perceives as superior to her or in a superior position to her, somehow. People she needs, people she derives narcissistic supply from or through narcissistic supply by proxy, vicariously, and so on. These are significant people in her life and so she would not dare to abuse them and she would tolerate their abuse.
However, people who are beneath her, inferior to her, would trigger in her the narcissist and she would become extremely abusive. It is a way to compensate for the humiliation and the rage associated with being submissive.
In other words, when she abuses a healthy normal guy, it's as if she's compensating for having been abused by a cerebral narcissist.
And we call this process, the clinical term, is displacement. She displaces her negative affects, her negative emotions. And she displaces them from someone who cannot be a target to someone who can be a target.
She is very selective in targeting people.
Actually, displacement is a very common phenomenon, even among healthy normal people.
You go to work, your boss is on your case. Your boss humiliates you publicly, shames you, attacks you, criticizes you relentlessly and endlessly and so on so forth, you've had a horrible day.
But you can't shout at your boss. You can't demean or criticize your boss. You can't humiliate your boss unless you want to lose your job.
So, you bite your lips, you stand down, you accept your meek, you're weak, you're there and you are the target of the boss's attentions, negative attentions, and you are like the darkboard. You know, there's a bullseye on your back and everyone is shooting at it.
So there's a lot of resentment, a lot of humiliation, a lot of shame, and a lot of rage or anger in you. But they're pent up. You cannot express them because the boss is not a legitimate target. The cost of counterattacking the boss would be calamitous. You would lose your job and you really need it.
So what you do, you go back home and you take it out on your wife or your children or the neighbor or some stranger that's called displacement happens a lot and the question described the typical displacement in narcissism.
Because all narcissists, not only covert, all narcissists displace negative affects. They rage at the wrong targets. They envy the wrong people they always displace because they don't dare, they're cowards, they're bullies. Bullies are cowards. They don't dare to attack or to counter attack or to respond in kind to their own tormentors.
And so when they have a role model for example, they would accept anything when they have a boss or an authority figure which they are afraid of or respect or whatever, then they would tolerate anything and everything and they would go home and they would take it out on the intimate partner. Or they would externalize aggression in some way. It could even push them to the point of becoming momentarily a psychopath.
So this is the answer. Displacement.
Okay, as you see, narcissism is a delectable phenomenon and I wish you all good recovery from this video.